Review: Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds , by Jayna Brown
2022; Wiley; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1525/jpms.2022.34.1.170
ISSN1533-1598
Autores Tópico(s)Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
ResumoJayna Brown begins Black Utopias with a provocation: utopias, especially Black ones, are already here, but they might not revolve around (or even include) the human.She writes, "What if utopia had no humans at all, re-enchanted or otherwise?To loosen anthropocentric notions of human sanctity is to imagine the possibility of a profound paradigm shift, a perspectival sea change to a view of ourselves as made of the same (9)."Brown arrives at this point by suturing an understanding of Blackness as that which is excluded from modernity's category of the human with an expansive conception of utopia that incorporates practices, epistemes, and materialities into spatiality.The result is a set of sensual explorations that rubs up against the violences that abut Blackness.Central to Brown's theorizations of utopia are reformations of being itself so that the strictures of modernityliberal individualism, monogamy, genital sexuality, and linear time-are undone by the artists and thinkers with whom she engages.This version of ontology, it turns out, produces a vibrational episteme, drawing upon the sonic as a key element of Black utopia: "Vibrations/sound waves mark the porousness between this world and otherworldly states of being (10)."The sonic is most evident in the chapters that center on musicians-Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra-but the vibrational undergirds each of the book's three sections."Ecstasy" offers a pair of chapters that focus on Black female mystics.Upending what people think they might know about Black women during the time of enslavement, Brown grounds her analysis of the archives of Sojourner Truth, Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Rebecca Cox Jackson, Black female preachers who journeyed through upstate New York.Brown offers sustained attention to their corporeal practices, so as to connect their religious beliefs with their own specific modes of attaining intimate connection, healing, and possibly joy.This also has the effect of highlighting the multi-sensory aspects of the vibration, especially since Brown is particularly alert to the ways that these sensualities subverted norms of gender and heteronormativity in their foci on community and connection to spiritual realms.The second chapter complicates readings of Alice Coltrane that would read her as anti-feminist or subordinate her to her husband, John, to delve into her profound engagement with Hindu cosmology, which emphasizes sound as the mechanism to "merge with a larger cosmic consciousness (10)."Coltrane/Turiyasangitananda, Brown argues, mobilizes music in order to loosen attachment to liberal individualism ("to melt") and
Referência(s)